A $2 Million Contest Seeks Solutions to Big Internet Challenges

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: August 26, 2017 at 7:07:46 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A $2 Million Contest Seeks Solutions to Big Internet Challenges
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Gary Rimar.  DLH]
>
> A $2 Million Contest Seeks Solutions to Big Internet Challenges
> While the fictional geniuses in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” aim to reinvent the Internet, Mozilla and the NSF hope prize 
> money will attract real-world innovations
> By TEKLA S. PERRY
> Aug 23 2017
> <http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/a-2-million-contest-seeks-solutions-to-big-internet-challenges>
>
> In the season finale of HBO’s television series “Silicon Valley,” fictional startup company Pied Piper’s attempt to 
> create a decentralized Internet appears to have failed spectacularly, thanks to mobile-phone explosions and a 
> disastrous attempt to move a server. But then the distraught founders discover that their network is actually ticking 
> along just fine. How? It turns out that the network has jumped to smart refrigerators. Now that’s resilient!
>
> The Internet of Refrigerators is, of course, fiction. But could an Internet that is this resilient—or nearly 
> so—become a reality? Mozilla and the U.S. National Science Foundation think it’s possible, and they aim to accelerate 
> its creation by offering US $2 million in prize money to the teams that invent it—or at least get close.
>
> “We’ve picked two of the most challenging situations in which people are disconnected from the Internet,” Mozilla 
> program manager Mehan Jayasuriya told me. These are “connecting people in the U.S. who don’t have reliable or 
> affordable Internet, and connecting people as quickly as possible after a major disaster, when the traditional 
> networks go down.”
>
> Mozilla and the NSF are addressing that first group—an estimated 34 million people—with the “Smart-Community Networks 
> Challenge.” It seeks wireless technology designed to enhance Internet connectivity by building on top of existing 
> infrastructure.
>
> For the second group, there’s the “Off-the-Grid Internet Challenge.” This contest is seeking technology that can be 
> quickly deployed after a disaster to allow people to communicate if and when Internet access is gone.
>
> The teams submit initial designs and then, later, working prototypes. Prizes at the design stage range from $10,000 
> to $60,000. At the working prototype stage, the stakes range from $50,000 to $400,000, with a top award given for 
> each challenge category.
>
> “A lot of projects out there address some parts of these problems,” says Jayasuriya. “With $2 million on the table, 
> we are hoping this challenge encourages people to fill their technologies out.”
>
> Were HBO’s Pied Piper an actual company, it would have a decent chance at winning some of that cash. Says Jayasuriya: 
> “It’s the kind of thing we are looking for—a big idea, a crazy idea, an idea about how you piggyback on things that 
> already exist. Pied Piper’s approach is like that, looking at all the phones out there and thinking that these phones 
> have radios, and power, and CPUs, so why wouldn’t you take them and turn them into nodes on a network?”
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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